Syria, John Lennon & Debian WIPO panel appointed

WIPO has confirmed the members of the panel looking at the debian.community UDRP harassment. If you are aware that any of these panelists has a conflict of interest or bias in the case please contact us immediately.

We published our response to the WIPO UDRP harassment.

Matthew Kennedy

The presiding panelist is Matthew Kennedy. He has worked at the WTO Secretariat in Geneva. He gained his Master of International and Comparative Law at ULB in Brussels, the same venue that hosts the FOSDEM conference where Molly de Blanc infamously used cat pictures to promote shaming the developers.

Clive Thorne

Each party to the dispute was asked to propose three candidates. From the list proposed by Jonathan Saul Cohen, acting for the cabal, WIPO has selected Clive Thorne of British law firm McCarthy Denning.

Oleksiy Stolyarenko

From the list proposed by the volunteers, publishers of debian.community News, WIPO has chosen Oleksiy Stolyarenko of Ukraine. Mr Stolyarenko's CV tells us he previously worked in the copyright division of the Ukraine office for intellectual property.

The cabal is arguing that they can snuff out any Debian co-author on a whim. We feel it will be hard for these experts on intellectual property to agree with the cabal.

If the panel denies the claim from the cabal that does not mean they endorse the content on this web site. Even we don't like some of the things we write about here. The panel is simply deciding on the question of rights and legitimate interests to use the name debian.

Expelling landowners in Syria's war

During the war in Syria, the aggressors have sought to destroy paper records at land registries or replace them with forgeries.

We see similar tactics being employed in Ukraine where Russia has demolished entire neighborhoods in Mariupol and incinerated the bodies of people who lived there.

The cabal attempting to hide some Debian Developers, co-authors of the Debian software, is being equally vicious. Copyright title simply doesn't recognize the concept of expulsions or resignations. If somebody has contributed to Debian in the past then their copyright interest continues for their entire lifespan and beyond.

Telling us that girlfriends who wrote no code are Debian Developers is a lot like putting those fake records into the land title registry.

Execution of John Lennon from the Beatles

When Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon of the Beatles, he said he was motivated by Lennon's comments that the Beatles were more popular then Jesus Christ. It resonates with the extreme censorship we see in open source "communities" today.

Nonetheless, even in death, Lennon's copyright interests did not cease. In fact, the value of his copyright interests is based on a combination of factors. As he was both a songwriter and a performer, he has copyright interest in both the sheet music, the lyrics and the audio recordings of performances. These are assets that exist independently. Michael Jackson famously bought the entire backcatalog of Beatles performances about five years after Lennon died.

If copyright interest can live on after somebody is shot, how can Jonathan Saul Cohen tell us that copyright interest can be extinguished by allegations of expulsion or a trademark?